Home At Last! with Patty Gironda

My need for dried and fresh herbs will increase dramatically with the opening of our new Bed and Breakfast, Casa Bella . I relied heavily on my kitchen garden the first time around and look forward to planning and planting another garden in a few weeks. I dried quite a few seeds over the late summer, fall and winter; hoping to grow them this season in my own garden, My hope is that everything will taste as good as the original store-bought version. How often can you even say that anymore? Too often the fruit and veggies have no flavor and mealy textures. So, we'll see. One of my big goals for the year is to create raised beds on our empty lot behind the cottage and share it with a few neighbors and friends in the hopes of creating a "co-op" garden filled with herbs, vegetables, melons, fruit bushes and trees. I love our Newnan Market Days and am thinking about selling my herb and spice blends that I dry and blend from leftovers of episodes of Home At Last! Which f...

I mentioned in an earlier post that I once paid dearly for a small box of dried green chiles that I believe were jalepenos or possibly poblanos. It's been so long since I have been able to find them that I finally decided to dry them myself. If you scroll down you can see the fresh poblanos that I bought for my experiment. What I love about drying the chiles myself is that there is absolutely no waste. The final product is pictured in the upper right corner and closely matches the volume sold for $12. I used two poblanos to fill my jar. The cost was under $3. The method I chose couldn't have been easier. I sat the cleaned and dried chiles on paper towels and turned them every day for a week. After that I simply strung them with kitchen twine and hung them in my pantry for another two weeks. The results were excellent; I not only have the flesh of the pablanos to add to my Mexican dishes but I have the seeds-which I hope to sprout and plant in the spring.